NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: Keselowski Steers Clear
With some nifty driving, Brad Keselowski carries the Chase lead into Martinsville…
Mike Hembree  |  Posted October 22, 2012   Kansas City, KS
Brad Keselowski tallied two wins and eight top-10 finishes in the 10-race Chase. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
If Brad Keselowski rolls on to win the Sprint Cup championship, he can look back on a particularly impressive move he made in Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway as one of the primary building blocks.

The incident was only a small part of the overall chaos that enveloped the speedway Sunday, but it could have put a serious kink in Keselowski’s plans to win his first title. It happened in the second half of the race, and it spotlighted two drivers not in the Chase – Kyle Busch and Ryan Newman.

Their versions of the wreck differed – and Busch seemed significantly irritated at Newman in the aftermath. They made contact and crashed hard in the fourth turn, sending both cars to the garage area for good.

Keselowski’s role? He was running behind the two and made a perfect drive through the accident site, missing the spinning cars and the others who had slowed and/or made dramatic maneuvers to avoid the crash.

Keselowski’s alert action kept him in the top 10, left his car as one of the few remaining unscathed vehicles on the track and sent him on the way to an eighth-place finish. On this day, when 14 cautions gummed up the works and mangled race cars dotted the garage, any finish in the top 10 could be counted as positive.

With four races left in the Chase, Keselowski retained a seven-point lead at the top of the standings.

“I see it coming all the way down to Homestead,” Keselowski said after the race. “It will be decided there. I’m happy with the season that we’ve had so far and the position that we’re in. It’s going to come down to the last race. That’s pretty obvious after today.”

Keselowski swam through the cautions and other assorted difficulties to advance from a starting position of 25th to a good finish.

“It was hard to overcome 25th at a repaved track where it’s one lane,” crew chief Paul Wolfe said. “That’s the biggest thing that we fought today – where we started. We’re going to have to figure that out to win this championship.”

Wolfe said Keselowski drove a smart race to keep himself atop the Chase.

“We saw some really good cars just lose it on their own today,” Wolfe said. “It got to a point in the race where he wasn’t going to be one of those guys today. He drove hard. He wasn’t going to make it a worse day than it could have been.

“We’ll take an eighth-place finish, be happy with the points that we got and head to Martinsville.”

And therein rests the potential rub. Of the final four races, Martinsville stands as Keselowski’s biggest challenge. He has raced there only five times in a Sprint Cup car, with no wins and no top fives. Jimmie Johnson, his biggest challenger in the championship race, is a Martinsville kingpin, with six victories and 18 top-10 runs in 21 starts.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
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